> For the record, this is what genuinely useful people look like: “Is there anything I can do to help?” Maybe. As anyone who’s played Overcooked knows, if you’

> For the record, this is what genuinely useful people look like: “Is there anything I can do to help?” Maybe. As anyone who’s played Overcooked knows, if you’re the critical resource in a crisis, too many “what can I do?” requests can quickly become of negative value. Often better is to observe the situation, use your judgment to guess what they might need, and make a specific offer. In Overcooked, that might be, “Looks like you’re going to need some tomatoes in a sec. I’ll start bringing them over.” In a production outage, “I see your pager’s melting; do you want me to mute the alerts you already know about?” or to get meta, “I’ll start coordinating communication about the incident so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself to #outage newcomers who keep asking what’s going on or how they can help.”